The 2084 Precept (61 page)

Who knows, but I was not going to spend a
frustrating hour or so calling other hotels with which I was not
acquainted. The method used for the allocation of stars to hotels
in this country is strongly dependent upon the different phases of
the moon in which the allocations are made. I approached a taxi and
asked the driver if he knew of a decent hotel with a vacant room.
He made one call and told me there were some vacancies at an
absolutely superb hotel he knew of, and so I said
'bien hecho,
hombre'
, heaved my suitcase into his vehicle and told him to
take me there without delay. Much appreciated my good man.

However, we headed east and passed Portixol
and continued onwards in the direction of the airport. Which caused
me to panic. I asked him where we were going to. We were going to
Playa de Palma, he said.

Oh no, oh no. Ganesha, save me from this
most hideous of all fates, protect me please from the evils of the
stinking swamp, deliver me unto the land of milk and honey, the
goats and the bees won't bother me.
Please
.

Ganesha, if you are interested and I
appreciate you may not be, is arguably the most popular of the
thirty-three Hindu gods. He is a male and he has the form of an
elephant with a human stomach and he rides on a mouse. No, I am not
trying to mislead you, that is the way it is, it is easy to check.
Anyway, this is the god responsible for destroying all evils and,
unbelievably incompetent though he has patently proven himself to
be, who knows if he might not be willing to assist me on this
occasion.

"I am
not
," I told the driver, "under
any circumstances going to stay in Arenal."

Arenal, as you may know, is Ballermann
country and the only people who go anywhere near there tend, among
other things, to sport vast beer bellies or have razorblades
hanging from their ears and not infrequently both. I would rather
sleep elsewhere. For example, in a bus station in Albania, of which
there are very few, as with most things in that repulsive niche of
human destitution.

Ah, said the driver cunningly, but this
hotel is not exactly in Arenal, it is right at the beginning of the
Playa de Palma, a hundred meters
before
you reach Arenal. A
quiet area, a superb four-star hotel.

Now the term 'quiet', for a Spaniard,
possesses a significance violently divergent from the one you and I
possess. It is as comparable in its divergence as would be an
agreement to meet him somewhere at a pre-determined time. And four
stars in Spain is a category not only dependent upon the moon, but
also on the local birdbrain minion responsible for the decision,
and in reality it denotes anything from one star upwards, while at
the same time guaranteeing you three star guests and two star
employees.

This hotel was not quiet. Nor was the street
behind it, nor the street in front of it. And the hotel swimming
pool—three or four strokes would take you from one end to the
other—received its non-stop entertainment from the screeching and
screaming hordes of pre-pubescent juveniles enjoying themselves on
the beach across the road. There were possibly pubescent ones there
as well, but with brains that had not yet reached the puberty stage
and maybe never would. Ganesha had once again demonstrated his
pathetic and unequalled inadequacy as a god. Or maybe he simply
doesn't give a shit. Could be.

No matter, we swim with the tides and a
squall is a squall and not a storm. The hotel only charged me an
extra half-price for my early arrival and the room was comfortable
and the air-conditioning was unusual in that it functioned in
accordance with my adjustments.

The first thing I did, I called the hotel in
Illetas and booked a room for tomorrow for as long as I wished to
stay. I told them I would pay for two weeks in advance; not
necessary sir, they said, our custom is to charge at the end of
each month. Falling asleep again was the second thing I did.

I did nothing much else except lounge around
the pool, if a pint-sized bucket permits the term, and, swimming
not being feasible, cool off occasionally in the water. In the
evening I went on the hunt for a restaurant. I walked past a
fenced-in and firmly closed church in a square facing the beach—you
can't go far in Spain without coming across a church, they hold the
world record for churches per head of population—and then I was in
Germany. I walked past a number of eating establishments,
'Oberbayern', 'Deutsches Eck', 'Wurstkönig', 'Grill Meister',
'Bavaria', 'Münchner Kindl'
and so forth, you get the idea, and
stepped onto the terrace of one which at least had a friendly name.
'Aber Hallo'
it was called. I ignored the 'Sauerbraten', the
'Rotkohl', the 'Knödel' and other similar Teutonic offerings and
ordered a chicken salad and a whole bottle of dry Riesling and both
were very good.

I walked back in the balmy night air to the
hotel, passing, among other things, the 'Red Lips' Erotic Show
Center, one of those places young males need to experience at least
once in life in order to learn never to visit them again. Nowadays
you pay between €30 and €100 per drink for whatever drinks are
ordered, and this provides you with the dubious benefit of not
being able to talk to any of the eastern European females who
inhabit these holes in the wall, mainly because they are unable to
converse in any of the world's major languages. Of course, if you
speak Bulgarian or Rumanian or Russian, you don't have that
problem, but conversation is not exactly the name of the game
anyway. So you just get a hand-job if you are that way inclined
and, if you're drunk enough, you lose your wallet and you don't
find out about it until the next morning; or—if you're really
lucky—they've taken all of your cash and maybe your credit cards
and your debit cards, but you've still got your wallet.

Had I been in the design center at the time
they were working on Adam and Eve, I would have made it the other
way round. We males would be the inhabitants of these places and
young females would be the ones wandering in and paying us money to
assist them in temporarily alleviating their lust. But I was
unfortunately not around at the time.

Sunday morning. I woke up refreshed. I went
out onto the balcony. The Spanish sun was shining and the Spanish
sky was blue. There was also quite a strong wind as is often the
case on Mallorca, one of the benefits of being an island. There are
worse places to live for the price of having to turn your hearing
aid down.

I didn't stay on the balcony for long. The
wing in which my room was located diagonally faced another of the
hotel's wings and around half of the balconies over there had
people sitting on them and a hefty percentage of those people were
playing with their mobile phones. A fair number of them were
actually talking into their phones or, to be more correct, shouting
into them, the need for which has recently fully analyzed and
explained by, among others, child psychologists. And the air was
consequently full of those grating consonants and jarring vowels
which are the hallmark of this planet's harshest and most strident
of languages, German, and that is the way it would presumably
remain until they all cleared off to the beach or onto their bus
for their visit to the cathedral or for their tour around the
mountains.

But it was a woman who finally drove me back
inside. She was sitting opposite me on her balcony, fortyish or
thereabouts and if not grossly fat, then at least disgustingly so.
And as soon as she noticed me, she got up, went into her room and
came back out wearing only a tanga, udders and belly hanging freely
in accordance with the theories expounded by Galileo, Newton and
others. She specifically avoided looking in my direction but
pretended to be adjusting her sole piece of clothing in order to
more properly cover that part of her which it was supposed to be
covering and which, thank God, it was. My views on the requirement
in certain parts of the Islamic world for the wearing of
burkas
took on a more positive hue. I bolted back into my
room, metaphorically vomiting on the way, and reflecting on the
fact that Jeremy Parker's delusions were nothing compared to those
of human females such as these.

But no big deal, it was a holiday hotel of a
certain level, the adjective requiring no further elaboration, and
I would be out of here in a few hours' time. I put on some shorts
and a T-shirt. I avoided the hotel breakfast room, the coffee in
these places is usually ghastly. I bought yesterday's IHT down the
road and read it while drinking some decent coffee in a place
facing the sea and revoltingly called 'Chez Hartmut'. There had
been 243 conflict deaths planet-wide on Friday, including six car
bombs and five suicide bombings. Not bad.

Next to Hartmut's was a place renting
bicycles and I picked one up for half a day and cycled along the
beach path to Palma, past the docks and the naval station, past
Porto Pí, and up the hill and out of the other side of the city. I
sat on a rock and smoked a cigarette. I enjoyed watching the
coastline and the ocean for a while, and I enjoyed a second
cigarette.. And then I cycled back, stopping on the way for two
cold beers in Cala Estancia. German beers of course, not your
gaseous Spanish concoctions whose wafer-thin and short-lived foam
is only possible thanks to the use of rice in the manufacturing
process; or so I am told. About twenty-five kilometers in total,
more than enough in this heat.

I went out to the hotel bucket and splashed
around a bit and relaxed in the sun. It was great, just great, to
be away from the world of lunatics, aliens, policemen, ministers
and birdbrains in general for a while, and to contemplate the piles
of money and the return to normality which would be mine after a
few more interviews with Jeremy.

I checked out of the hotel at 2 p.m. and
took a taxi to Illetas, a small town a few kilometers to the west
of Palma. This is my kind of hotel. To be sure, it costs what it
costs, but you get adults only, you get a luxurious room with a
wide balcony overlooking the ocean, you get two pools, large pools,
or—if you prefer—you walk down into the sea from a ladder fixed to
the rocks, and you get service, you get well-trained waiters and
you get personnel all over the place. And it's only twenty minutes
or so from the center of Palma.

And so for the rest of the afternoon it was
just the sun and the water for me. And in the evening I called
Monika. She sounded subdued. Her sister was to be operated on
tomorrow morning but she didn't want to talk about it. She was in
love with my car, and Mr. Brown had settled in and was enjoying
life as he always did. She wished she could also be in Palma but
she would certainly make up for it later on with that wonderful,
exorbitant Corsica gift of mine. I asked her if she had the
Mallorca hotel details I had given her and she said of course she
did, she was not as young as she used to be but she hadn't got
Alzheimer's yet. I told her I would be back with her car in three
weeks' time, four at the latest and she said that would be great,
she could thank me properly for her birthday, whatever she meant by
that. In the meantime, she said, she had her friend Mr. Brown, he
reminded her of me.

Well, I thought to myself, she is definitely
becoming too nest-like, I will have to take gentle steps to make it
clear again that I am not, at this point in my life, interested in
nests in any shape or form, with or without eggs.

I had dinner in the hotel, a ruinously
expensive
filet mignon
which was superb and a ruinously
expensive Rioja which was not very good at all. I then spent some
time on the Naviera's financial statements and made notes of the
specific items I needed to find out more about tomorrow, and I went
to bed and fell asleep over my book which, in case you're
interested, was
Platform
, a translated version of an
intellectually interesting novel written by a Frenchman who lives
in Ireland. Recommended, despite his penchant for over-explicit
sexual descriptions which tend to crop up here and there, and which
you can simply ignore. Or, if you are like me, not.

I got up at seven o'clock. The sun was
rising nicely, the ocean was blue and it was green and it was as
calm as a pond, the balcony lounge chair was comfortable, and I had
breakfast brought up and ate it while absorbing the scene, and the
first cigarette of the day tasted as good as the coastline looked.
Oh yes, there were worse locations in which to perform a
consultancy assignment. Slough for example.

I wore a suit and a tie and a short-sleeved
white shirt for my first day. I pulled the switch and converted my
brain into full Spanish language mode, a simple enough matter of
neuron reprogramming similar to that of switching your driving to
the left side of the road when arriving in the U.K. Or, come to
that, in Japan or any of the other countries which do the same.

I took a taxi to the docks entrance and was
met there, a real slice of courtesy, by the general manager
himself, Alfonso Orfila. I like that kind of thing as much as the
next guy, it makes you feel important, even if you're not, and what
is the harm in that? He fixed the security arrangements with the
port policeman and I would be able to come and go as I wished. He
took me to the office building, the first floor of which was
occupied by the Naviera. He showed me the office I would be using,
and then he introduced me to the staff and asked them to please
cooperate with me for the duration of my 'review' assignment. There
were only nine of them, six men and three women, two of whom were
middle-aged and one of whom was in her early twenties, black hair,
pretty face and good legs. She had an attractive name, María del
Carmen.